Returners - how long did it take you to settle?

[Bristol07]

Hi All

I am just looking for a bit of advice / hope about how long it took any returners to settle in Ireland after being away for so long.

I grew up in NI but left 17 years ago to live in England where I worked, met my English husband and had our children. It was a really good life and we were happy but the pull to be near family during lockdown meant we decided to move to ROI at the start of this year. It’s only been 7 months but I’m really struggling to settle and feeling increasingly sad and wondered how others dealt with this. Does it get any easier and if so how long did it take to settle and feel at home?

I love Ireland and all the wonderful people but I suppose I miss my old life where I spent most of my adult years. This isn’t a complaining post - I’m very grateful for what I have here , I just wondered has anyone gone through something similar or did anyone not settle and go back and how was that?

many thanks for any help.

Hi,

I have a similar story. Grew up in NI, moved to SE England, stayed for 15 years, married English dh and had dc. Lockdown did solidify that I wanted to be home so we made the move to NI. We've all adjusted well. Interestingly my dh better than me! All my family is within 20 minutes (dh and I made sure they weren't on our doorstep!) and my best friend lives nearby.

We have a better standard of life here. Better social lives and dc attends better schools. I miss the weather in England and accessibility to France, but there's nothing I can't do here that I did there.

What is it specifically that you miss?

Somebody told me on returning that it took five years! I looked at them disbelievingly.

It took five years! People here are in deep webs of friendships and family connections that go back decades, presumably you left your own networks behind. Some people find it very easy to leave these networks and rejoin others others (me) don’t. I also like having a tight tribe, that takes time to create.

Find: a book group, a gym activity, other people in the town/area who have also returned home. Basically fake it til you make it. I used mumsnet and Reddit as substitute places to chat.

But it can def be hard!

Also we returned to where we had been every summer for a few years and for the first two years I sobbed when I came home. But lockdown changed everything, I was forced to stop looking back through rose tinted spectacles and really invest in my life here, plus the beauty of the landscape and the natural world means so much here.

What stage are you at, do you have kids here, are you in the Forever House etc?

I grew up in the West of Ireland, lived in London for over 12 years, met my DH there and had our first child there then moved back to the SE of Ireland to my DH's home place.

I got pregnant with my second DS within a month of moving here so didn't bother getting a job as I was as sick as a small hospital for most of the pregnancy. We initially moved to a rural cottage for 6 months before buying our current house.

I found it hard to settle mostly from loneliness and it was hard to break into already established groups. They were open to a certain level for small chat but not in a friendship. I plagued DH to move back to London. It was after I had my baby and the PHN - public health nurse who was a lovely women mentioned me to another mother on her rounds so she got a friend to call round and introduce herself and then we became friends and she included me in other parenting type friendship groups.

Once I got that first introduction everything changed and I formed some great friendships.

If the PHN hadn't helped I was at the stage of considering putting an advert in the local paper to see if there were others interested in meeting up.

As it turned out most of the people who were most open to being friends were those who had lived abroad at some stage. I reckon it was 12-18 months before I settled. I've had a much better life here since I moved here.

I agree @honeyrider , the established groups are hard work, much easier to find people who are in the same situation you are! Thank goodness for you your phn set you up, it’s insane how one link leads to another! I am still quite irritated at a couple of my sister’s friends, classic small town girls with huge networks, had big Christmas parties and didn’t invite me (I mean I’m a very normal and unembarrassing person…). It would have made SUCH a difference to bumping into people I’d known years ago. Of course they don’t owe me anything but it would be a nice gesture. I always go out of my way now if I meet a new mum at the school gate to suggest a coffee or a beach walk or whatever.

The irony is that now that I have established my own group of friends now some of the original cold shouldery types are much more interested! Flipping human nature! That’s why I say you have to fake it til you make it.

good luck!

Thanks for this!

same here - my dh has settled far better than me and he’s from north England.

I suppose I miss the connections and support network I built up over 17 years and underestimated how hard it would be starting from scratch. We don’t have any family where we are - they’re about 3 hours away. I also miss my old job and our old house. When we first looked to move back to Ireland the houses in the place we decided to move to have gone up 17% so we actually now cannot afford to buy in the place we are renting which makes me feel “stuck”. The kids are settled in school in this area and I don’t want to uproot them again but we can’t afford to buy in the place.

@sorbetseason we have three kids who have all settled into local primary school. Eldest is 11 and she would have been going to secondary should we have stayed in England. My husband likes the fact she will have another couple of years in primary school but then we have the uncertainly of what secondary school to get her into as the area we are in is so overpopulated and the schools so heavily oversubscribed. Whereas in England she has a place in an outstanding secondary school so that was peace of mind.

my other dc are a few years younger and first class and junior infants.

no we don’t have a forever home and that’s part of the reason I’m so unsettled I think - we are renting but had planned to buy but house prices have gone up so much we couldn’t afford to buy the same house we had in England over here. We would have to dramatically downsize which isn’t ideal with three growing kids. I think the stress of the housing crisis has got to me and the uncertainty of it all. I’m not sure I could feel like this for 5 years though! I’m really glad to hear you are settled now though x

@honeyrider i am really happy to hear you’ve settled and it took a shorter period of time - 12/18 months is doable!

you’re so right about making connections- that’s what I miss terribly. All those friends and support networks built up organically over such a long time is hard to replace. It takes time and energy and as I’m working full time I just can’t seem to find the time / energy to do it as either working or running around with the kids. I suppose it’s about making time

Marking my place as I’m seriously contemplating finally making the move back.
We almost decided to in 2019 and then covid hit and time stood still. I am terrified of moving and regretting it but nearly even more terrified of not taking the chance and regretting that.
We are based in London and each year (month!) that goes past I love it a little less. The recent heatwave didn’t help - I particularly hate the really hot dry summers here. I loathe not being able to get to the coast, in fact we only ever really leave London via an airport these days as the traffic adds just too much time to every journey. I feel trapped in the summer and I hate that feeling. We have zero family here and weirdly I am feeling the pain of that moreso now as the kids are getting older. No close connections, no cousins, no family Sunday lunches, no family gatherings. We spend a large proportion of our annual leave visiting family in Ireland but the intense week together here or there - while lovely - is nothing like regular casual contact. The kids’ friends in London are often busy at weekends seeing their extended families and it makes me sad that we don’t have that in our lives. I have a child in secondary and a child in primary - I worry that the timing is not great but then it’s never going to be perfect. Because we would be selling a property in London we would be relatively well set-up to buy a decent place, and I am hoping I could work remotely or commute a few days a month if need be. My DH is English but loves Ireland and feels no real connection to England.
Reading some of the “returner” threads here does scare me a lot as it seems some people really struggle to settle, if they ever do. In one way I feel I have less to lose maybe as I often feel lonely here as it is, I work fulltime and it leaves very little time for hobbies and friends - especially with the pace of life in London - and so I don’t have a huge friend network that I will leave behind. Though I do have a small number of wonderful friends that I would hope to maintain contact with. On the plus side I love the sea, watersports, outdoors, nature and I envisage a lifestyle in Ireland that would have a lot more of all of that. My parents are aging fast and I also worry hugely that if I wait much longer it will be too late to spend time with them.

Apart from the weather and the difficulty of breaking into friendship groups, what are the other - perhaps unexpected- struggles people have had to face when moving back?

Sorry OP - I didn’t mean to hijack your thread. I started typing a short note and it all came tumbling out! I can start a new thread to sort out my own worries. Back to your original questions.. .

Oh good do it @TideTimeSea ! Move, that is not start a new thread. It really is the best thing I ever did, I LOVE it here. Lots of adjustments and difficulties, but I had very very similar situation to you and it’s all just so much easier here. It’s just so fresh and clean and green.

@sorbetseason I returned home to Aus after many years in London and your comment about your DC's friends busy on weekends spending time with extended family really hit me as that's where I felt my DC were missing out the most. I made the move home and I sometimes regret not having done it sooner.

I read these threads in Craicnet as dh is Irish and I know at some point we'll make the move there (hopefully not for a good few years though! 🤐) and I real hope all those who are thinking about returning do and it's successful.

@Bristol07 could part of the difficulty be that you didn’t really move back to your ‘home’ town in NI but to somewhere in Ireland where you have to resettle and make new friends without any real connections?

We moved back 4 years ago, and settled back in quickly, thankfully, but I had moved back to where I came from, and friends etc were still here.

Would you consider moving north?

Myself and my daughter moved back from the UK in Oct 2019 and my English partner came in Oct 2021 (covid delayed him). We’ve settled in well, she’s since started school here, he’s working and volunteering and has found a network. My friends are all in the process of moving home too so while at the moment my network is quite small it is growing every few months as someone else moves back.

For all of us the housing crisis is an issue. Basically everyone is living in family homes or holiday homes as house prices have exploded locally. It’s been a tough summer as anyone renting has had to leave to make room for holidaymakers and won’t be able to get back till September. It’s still worth it to be home, but not easy.

Thanks sorbetseason
It’s great to hear a positive story.
Maybe it’s a midlife crisis but I feel quite depressed at the thought of living out the rest of our working lives here. We would likely move to retire there anyway so what are we waiting for…
We are very fortunate in that we could likely buy a place mortgage free in Ireland, assuming there isn’t a huge London property crash (and / or currency crisis) in the meantime. So the housing crisis should not affect us too badly, although it does sound awful for everyone right now.
@Cloeycat are you living in a tourist destination and is that contributing to the issues? Due to holiday rentals etc.

i am worried about never fitting back in (I’ve now lived longer in the U.K. than I did in Ireland). Did any Irish returners find this an issue? We would be heading to a place with a pretty mixed population- lots of people from other countries have settled there, so I hoping that would help me feel less of an anomaly.
However I haven’t kept up with Irish news/popular culture at all so I am definitely out of touch.
Random cultural type thing I noticed when back in Ireland recently…we had the radio (2FM) on in the car and even though it was morning the theme of the chat seemed very adult. Lots of jokes about getting drunk and doing regrettable things etc. It was all a bit inappropriate and it was 11am on the national radio station. Maybe I’ve become prudish since moving away but I felt very uncomfortable with my young child in the back listening to it. Am I going to struggle fit in I wonder?!

Yes we do, very rural but a hotspot for 6 weeks every year. Loads of second homes too so between limited supply and very high prices a lot of us who grew up here are struggling to find homes where we are from.

I think you will adjust quite quickly, when I first got home I was delighted to find that Irish mothers are much less judgey than in the UK, there doesn’t seem to be the same disapproval about different parenting styles and it all feels much more relaxed.

@TideTimeSea maybe get an online subscription to an Irish paper and see if reading it makes you long to get on to the Liverpool ferry or makes you go I’m sorry what now? I think ireland as a society has changed a lot!

i felt like you about london, and moving here has been magical for me in that sense, just in that no matter how hard the social adjustment (and that is just personal as I am very sociable and like a big extended circle, which means in the macro I’m definitely better off here!) I do really love it here. I felt a bit joyless in london and sad. Just personal preference at different stages of life - I can quite imagine many of my happy Londoner friends abhorring life in a small Irish town!

Weirdly I had the opposite re radio stations in that I find the ones here a bit more socially conservative but actually in the end I got so sick of my small kids innocently singing really standard radio fare with very explicit lyrics that I just made a playlist with more ‘innocent’ pop stuff on.

Here are a few notes from my experience ->

I grew up in NI, and moved to England to go to Uni (as did many/most of the good students academically in my year). I studied and worked there for many years, then lived in the US for 5 years, and then back to a midlands (with kids). So in sense I (and later with family) were nomads. We had a good time everywhere we were, but were very conscious that we'd move on.

After our move back to midlands area we struggled to settle there for 2 years, even though we had good jobs, great place to live. That was the only time we had such an experience. and when jobs came up in Dublin are Ireland we moved there. Kids went to school, and all settled in no problem for many years. I think it was was because I was just so busy with work, and DH was starting a business, and with young kids, we just had no time to think!

Several years ago, for family reasons, we moved back to my home area in NI. It's a lovely scenic area, cost of living/housing much better than Dublin, much less "busy" in general. I continue to work for a company based in Dublin area, and in the office a few times per month.

Really had no problems to settle back in my home area. Logistically it was easier knowing the area, have extended family, and still a good few people I would have known from my school days.

So while it's all good here, I do dread the potential for a return to the time of the troubles here in NI overall. We never had any issues where I grew up, Unionist heartland area, not much diversity :) It's always at the back of my mind, and I hate to say it, but a number of our neighbours (and some extended family) could rightly be classified as sectarian bigots.

I don't have a great support network, but know the area, and love being here.

Really interesting to hear the different perspectives. We would be moving to ROI (south). I’m guessing moving from England to NI is less of a change because you are moving within the same country, e.g. remaining within the same U.K. systems for tax/health/currency/government etc etc?
One of our questions is the ROI health system - especially for my DH who is non-EU and has some medical issues. Is there an online resource with information about Ireland’s health service for non-nationals? I know we will need health insurance, just not sure how it all works.

@DonnaHadDee i do hope the troubles don’t kick off again…

This sentence of yours resonated with me as I think I will be the same - if anything I would be support for my parents as they age.
”I don't have a great support network, but know the area, and love being here.”
Loving where you live is very powerful!